Cirrus@Austlit

'Since colonisation, the tensions between the intentions and meanings of Indigenous performers and the cross-cultural framing and reception of their performance have been part of the complex relationship that exists between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Australia. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Indigenous-controlled performances drawn from their own historical cultural practices were a focal point of cross- cultural exchange and engagement. Within the colonial exercise, the Euro- Australian and European attitudes towards, and framing of, these performances as a lower form of practice were an important part of containing and colonising Indigenous cultures and the land. Since the 1970s, there have been many transitions and movements shifting the terms of reception and providing the basis for a more respectful engagement with Indigenous performance. However, the notion that Aboriginal historical practices represent primitive or simple cultural forms has continued as traces in the reception of performances that draw on traditional pre-contact practices.' Maryrose Casey.

'June 2008, Iris Robinson - MP, Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) member, and wife of Northern Ireland's controversy when she stated in a radio interview that homosexuality was an virtues of the ex-gay mission.' Alyson Campbell.

'In 2004, Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her musical flow of voices and counter-voces in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's cliches and their subjugating power". She has since then continued to expand one of the most prolific and many-faceted oeuvres in contemporary literature by working on a vast variety of issues spanning from the repression of the weak to the fascisms of everyday life in consumerist societies.
Through her very particular writing strategies, she has thus persisted in bringing up the painful subjects of the discourse of modernity. Jelinek is one of the most influential playwrights in contemporary German-speaking theatre and she also has a considerable stage impact internationally. But only this year have Australian audiences been able to witness the first ever production of Jelinek's work in their country.
My staging of three of Jelinek's "Princess Dramas" ("Snow White," "Sleeping Beauty" and "Jackie") at Red Stitch Actors Theatre in Melbourne (June-July 2011) was part of an ongoing wide research project that aims to 'recover' Jelinek for the English-speaking stage by working on theatrical strategies in order to bridge problems of intercultural transfer in the Austrian writer's plays and thereby, to fill an assumed 'gap of translation'. André Bastian.

'This article considers how Canadian and Australian multicultural theatre explores notions of individual identity in conjunction with issues of national and cultural identity. I use two plays as test studies - Sunil Kuruvilla's Rice Boy (2000) from Canada and Noelle Janaczewska's "Cold Harvest" (1998) from Australia - to analyse the dramaturgical and theatrical techniques employed to undermine prescriptive identity roles that have developed in both postcolonial nations.
The complex nature of cultural identity in these two multicultural nations is brought to the fore and identity is shown theatrically to be an intricate process, as opposed to the simplified, pre-existing subject positions, which I term the "imaginary citizenry".
The plays illustrate two strategies for challenging the imaginary citizen roles. The first mode is dramaturgical: the characters construct their own identities in a narratie mode. Employing Paul Ricoeur's concept of identity as a narrative process, the characters can be read as possessing the agency to tell, and re- tell, the stories of their lives in an effort to determine a workable sense of self. This, in turn, enables the second, theatrical mode through which identity is shown to be a constructive process: split subjectivity.
Through the process of self-narration the characters' personas are split and they shift they become versions of themselves at different ages, embody other characters altogether, or even perform a kind of self-doubling, in which they both act and observe themselves in certain situations. These fluid shifts in time, space and character allow the audience to witness a physical manifestation of the self-narration that enables the characters' self-understanding. Together, with both the dramaturgical and theatrical strategies in mind, these plays provide opportunities to broaden understandings about cultural, national and individual identity; they provide a forum through which to consider rethinking the ways in which official multiculturalism actually operates in Australia and Canada.' Tricia Hopton.